A Day in the Life of a Facebook Marketer

What’s it really like to be a Facebook marketer? Having managed campaigns for 200+ of the world’s leading performance marketers, we know that there can be a lot on a Facebook marketer’s plate every day.

How do you hire a Facebook marketer?

Specializing in Facebook marketing is relatively new, but there might be some key things to look out for. We look for candidates who are highly analytical and creative. Since the core of the Facebook campaign management role is analysis, you will want to make sure that your potential candidate is comfortable with data analysis and manipulating pivot tables. Additionally look for someone who can be creative, as they will participate in the development of new ad concepts and think of new strategies and approaches for improving campaign performance. They will also need to coordinate with many people, departments, and customers to ensure optimal campaign performance and long-term customer success.

What does a Facebook marketer do?

As a member of Nanigans’ Campaign Management team, I spend my day managing Facebook campaigns with Nanigans’ Ad Engine. I rely on our platform for its automated ad management, creation, bidding, budgeting, testing, optimization, and real-time reporting and analytics. Ad Engine makes it easy for me to:

Adjust bids automatically with goal-based dynamic bidding

Quickly create hundreds or thousands of combinations of ads

Identify high-value target audience segments

Monitor campaigns with full transparency into costs, revenue data, and bidding decisioning logic, with reporting that includes more than 100+ parameters

On a typical day, I turn on my computer, log into Ad Engine, and view my dashboard to check campaign performance. The screen shows very quickly how the campaign is trending today vs. yesterday vs. the previous week vs. previous month etc. I commonly run into the following three scenarios:

Volume is low, but the campaign is meeting its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Volume is high, but the campaign is not meeting its KPIs

Performance is great; how can I get more of it and scale the campaign?

1. Volume is low, but the campaign is meeting its KPIs

When it comes to scaling a Facebook advertising campaign, there are multiple ways to get more volume.

Volume can be low because bids are too low based on current market conditions

This means that your bids are too low according to current market conditions to gain enough traffic. A best practice is to increase your CPC, CPM, and CPA bids until you get more traffic. This will help you collect enough data to optimize to the advertiser’s definition of value.

It’s essential to test various creative elements and ad types

This will help you to understand your CTR and how to improve upon it. Maintaining a high CTR is crucial for consistent delivery in the News Feed and can help keep costs low.

Look for targeting segments that aren’t getting traffic

Either move these segments to a different campaign and bid more aggressively, or try new segments.

2. Volume is high, but the campaign is not meeting its KPIs

One of the hardest parts of managing a Facebook ad campaign is maintaining performance at a high level of volume.

Facebook ad creative can have a short shelf life

Once ad fatigue sets in, it’s important to refresh your ads—amplify those ads that perform well and pause those ads that aren’t performing. A best practice is to test various creative elements and ad types and push new ads daily.

Successful advertisers know how to generate interest in their products and give a reason to make a purchase now. Eye-catching images spark people’s interest and strong CTAs prompt users to complete the action you want them to take.

Market saturation can be another challenge

If you haven’t refreshed your targeting in a while, you most likely need to expand your reach to get in front of new audiences. Start with what you know works. Most advertisers already have a good idea of who their target audience is and it’s essential to leverage this data. Nanigans’ Ad Engine allows you to target known valuable customers via Custom Audiences, and to create Lookalike Audiences based on this data. Automated Custom Audiences allows you to update your user segments in real-time, which you can leverage to create dynamic Lookalike Audiences. Creating interest groups based on a customer’s affinity with the advertiser’s existing user base can also be a highly effective ad targeting approach.

It’s essential to monitor ad frequency and configure strategy group settings to maintain an optimal frequency throughout the day. If ads are displayed too often, particularly in smaller reach segments, performance will decline at a much faster rate. Defining and organizing your segments in the cleanest way possible can make a difference in the long run and help the campaign scale.

3. Performance is great! How do I get more?

I recommend monitoring your campaign in real-time so you can understand all relevant conversion events as they occur. This way, you can leverage the per-ad action rate and revenue data to make informed bidding and budgeting strategies and optimize to the best return on ad spend. Other approaches include:

Analyze and review your campaign results by goal

By leveraging data and trends, you can gain an understanding of what approaches are the most effective for your campaign. Colleen recommends looking at daily and weekly trends for ad spend, CTR, costs, and conversion rates.

For example, you may see within the Nanigans reporting tools that females ages 35+ are crushing it for your acquisition campaign and you want to get more of out this. Or you may find that customers you are targeting with FBX—users that have clicked to your site but haven’t immediately made a purchase—are more likely to convert when the campaign leverages dynamic creative or shows images that the user previously viewed on your website.

Keep your creative fresh and test, test, test

To maintain performance at a high level of volume, you need to keep your creative fresh. You can run small-scale tests and push new creative every day at any hour. As tests complete, analyze the results and add the best creative combinations to your existing ad plans to be pushed out to different audience segments.

It’s important to closely monitor ad frequency and to configure your strategy group settings to maintain an optimal frequency throughout the day. Use ad testing to select the ads that are performing well to run at scale.

Continue to engage with your audience

With 98% of website visitors failing to convert on their first visit to a website, it’s clear that some people take longer to mature than others. FBX allows you to capitalize on consumer intent shown on your website by serving ads on Facebook of products they viewed on your website. By adding FBX into your strategy, there’s a better chance of getting people to visit your site and ultimately convert.

As you can see, there is a great deal that goes into managing a Facebook campaign at scale. I find that my efforts to continuously achieve optimal campaign performance are rewarded most often by customers who know their target audiences, are open to testing new approaches, and are driven to meet their campaign performance goals. With the strategies outlined above, at the end of the day I can rest assured that my Facebook campaigns are hitting their goals as I head home to take my dog Burt for a walk.